“Everybody in the show had a name, a profession, institutional affiliation except Eng Yang, who was identified as “Hmong guy,” and me, “his niece.” The fact that I am an award-winning author was ignored. The fact that my uncle was an official radio man and documenter for the Hmong experience to the Thai government during the war was absent,” said Kao Kalia Yang after her interview about Yellow Rain with National Public Radio’s Radiolab in September 2012. During the two hour interview, of which less than five minutes was aired, Yang was brought to the point of tears over the interviewer’s harsh dismissal of her uncle’s experiences. She joins the Stanford Hmong Student Union to discuss her experience during the interview and the implications of the interview on ethnic minority voices in public radio.

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of award winning book, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir. Yang graduated from Carleton with a Bachelors degree in American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Cross-cultural Studies. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and has since then held numerous teaching positions including a professorship and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Sponsored by the Hmong Student Union at Stanford, the Stanford Asian American Students Association, and the Stanford Asian American Studies Department.

P.S. -- If ethnic bias in the media makes you as mad as it makes us, call Joel Brinkley out for his recent piece about Vietnam and Southeast Asia. We expect better from a journalism teacher at Stanford and Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting.